Film has its World Premiere Friday as part of the Park City at Midnight Section of the Sundance Film Festival

New York, NY (January 17, 2011) – Television rights to the upcoming Sundance premiere: CORMAN’S WORLD: EXPLOITS OF A HOLLYWOOD REBEL have been picked up ahead of its Sundance premiere by A&E INDIEFILMS as part of an investment in the project. The film marks the directorial debut of Alex Stapleton and chronicles the incredible career and massive Hollywood influence of legendary director and producer, Roger Corman. Corman will be in Park City for the world premiere of the film this Friday, January 21. The film also features bold-faced “Cormanites” such as Jack Nicholson, Ron Howard, Jonathan Demme, Martin Scorsese, and many others. The film was produced and financed by Far Hills Pictures’ Stone Douglass and Taylor Materne. Stapleton, Izabela Frank, Mickey Barold, and Jeff Frey also served as producers on the project.

The deal for CORMAN’S WORLD: EXPLOITS OF A HOLLYWOOD REBEL was negotiated by Molly Thompson, Vice President of A&E IndieFilms, with WME Global on behalf of Far Hills Pictures. Of the deal, Bob DeBitetto, President and General Manager of A&E Network and BIO Channel says, “Corman’s World is the preeminent retrospective of the life and career of one of Hollywood’s most prolific and influential filmmakers and we are pleased to partner with Stone Douglass and Taylor Materne to bring Alex Stapleton’s film to audiences around the world.” WME GLOBAL represents the film’s remaining available rights.

CORMAN’S WORLD: EXPLOITS OF A HOLLYWOOD REBEL marks the third major film coming out of Douglass and Materne’s Far Hills Pictures. Company, which formed in August 2009, also produced the Magnolia Pictures release BARRY MUNDAY, and Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed doc A LETTER TO ELIA. Of the acquisition Douglass says, “A&E IndieFilms and Molly Thompson have an amazing history of distributing the highest quality documentaries. They are the ideal partner for a film that celebrates the birth of independent filmmaking and its godfather, Roger.” Far Hills is repped by WME Global.

CORMAN’S WORLD: EXPLOITS OF A HOLLYWOODREBELtracks the triumphant rise of the true “godfather” of independent ﬁlmmaking, Roger Corman. The single most prolific writer-director-producer, Corman financed hundreds of profitable low-budget films and helped launch the careers of Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron, and many more. With archival footage of American culture and countercultures from the 1950’s to present day, and dynamic interviews with alumni of Corman’s cutthroat school of ﬁlmmaking, Corman’s World takes us back to the days when Corman was King. The film also shows the rise of the recent Corman renaissance featuring Indiewood’s new school of ﬁlmmakers – including Quentin Tarantino, Paul W.S. Anderson and Eli Roth. And of course it follows Roger himself as he successfully continues to produce and distribute films outside the studio system the Corman way: fast, cheap and out-of-this-world!

Stone Douglass and Taylor Materne created Far Hills Pictures in August ‘09 as an independent financing, development and production entity. Stone Douglass formerly ran STICK N STONE Productions where he financed and sold the independent feature, SPIN, which Universal released in the spring of 2010. Far Hills Pictures’ first feature, BARRY MUNDAY was released by Magnolia Pictures in October of 2010. The film (based on the novel, LIFE IS A STRANGE PLACE by Frank Turner Hollon), stars Patrick Wilson, Chloe Sevigny, Judy Greer, Jean Smart, Malcolm McDowell, Billy Dee Williams, Colin Hanks and Cybil Shepherd. Stone and Taylor also executive produced and co-financed A LETTER TO ELIA, which was co-written, directed and produced by Martin Scorsese. It aired on PBS ‘AMERICAN MASTERS’ in October 2010.

The purpose of this email is to introduce myself and my Reality Show I’ve written. My name is Dewitt T. Wood Jr., and I have been doing a lot of researching, about the television business and how I can get companies to look at my Reality Show.

Why is it so hard to break into Hollywood, if you do not have the resources others do. I live not to far from the White House. You would think by living in Washington, DC, that you would have an advantage.

All of these studios only deal with agents and people they have dealt with in the past. But when someone like me comes along, which is once every so decade, you have to go with the flow. A lot of networks have garbage on TV and what I have will not add to it. My show has 5 key elements, wide audience range 18 to 50, which means millions of viewers, provide the need for advertisers to publicize their products, Facebook and Twitter accounts, linked to show, money (high revenues). This will be the highest rated show ever and it will last just like Price is Right, Family Feud and a few more I have not listed.

I would really appreciate any advice or help you can give me, to help me move my Reality Show forward.

I’ve attached a peek at what my show will be like in PDF Format, without giving away to much, so I cover myself legally, until I get a face-to-face meeting set-up with a TV Network. Thank you for taking time out to help me.

Creator/Producer/Co-Host: Dewitt T. Wood Jr. Program Length: 1 hour
Series , Special or Reality: Reality Show Weekly or Monthly: Weekly

Reality TV Show Title: To protect my creation, I’ll disclose that information with
full details of my Reality Show in a face-to-face meeting.

Target Audience: Ages 18 to 49, with segments that will appeal to all ages, by involving Tweeter and
Facebook, which both have several million followers. All of who will be tweeting and facebooking,
while viewing my TV Show.

“You know, I was never a critic. I never considered myself as a film critic. I started doing short films, writing screenplays and then for awhile, for a few years I wrote some film theory, including some film criticism because I had to, but I was never… I never had the desire to be a film critic. I never envisioned myself as a film critic, but I did that at a period of my life when I thought I kind of needed to understand things about cinema, understand things about film theory, understand the world map of cinema, and writing about movies gave me that, and also the opportunity to meet filmmakers I admired.

“To me, it was the best possible film school. The way it changed my perspective I suppose is that I believe in this connection between theory and practice. I think that you also make movies with ideas and you need to have ideas about filmmaking to achieve whatever you’re trying to achieve through your movies, but then I started making features in 1986 — a while ago — and I left all that behind.

“For the last three decades I’ve been making movies, I’ve been living, I’ve been observing the world. You become a different person, so basically my perspective on the world in general is very different and I hope that with every movie I make a step forward. I kind of hope I’m a better person, and hopefully a better filmmaker and hopefully try to… It’s very hard for me to go back to a different time when I would have different values in my relationship to filmmaking. I had a stiffer notion of cinema.”
~ Olivier Assayas

A Spirited Exchange

“In some ways Christopher Nolan has become our Stanley Kubrick,” reads the first sentence of David Bordwell’s latest blog post–none of which I want or intend to read after that desperate opening sentence. If he’d written “my” or “some people’s” instead of “our”, I might have read further. Instead, I can only surmise that in some ways David Bordwell may have become our Lars von Trier.”
~ Jonathan Rosenbaum On Facebook

“Jonathan has written a despicable thing in comparing me to Trump. He’s free to read or not read what I write, and even to judge arguments without reading them. It’s not what you’d expect from a sensible critic, but it’s what Jonathan has chosen to do, for reasons of a private nature he has confided to me in an email What I request from him is an apology for comparing my ideas to Trump’s.”
~ David Bordwell Replies

“Yes, I do apologize, sincerely, for such a ridiculous and quite unwarranted comparison. The private nature of my grievance with David probably fueled my post, but it didn’t dictate it, even though I’m willing to concede that I overreacted. Part of what spurred me to post something in the first place is actually related to a positive development in David’s work–an improvement in his prose style ever since he wrote (and wrote very well) about such elegant prose stylists as James Agee and Manny Farber. But this also brought a journalistic edge to his prose, including a dramatic flair for journalistic ‘hooks’ and attention-grabbers, that is part of what I was responding to. Although I realize now that David justifies his opening sentence with what follows, and far less egregiously than I implied he might have, I was responding to the drum roll of that opening sentence as a provocation, which it certainly was and is.”
~ Jonathan Rosenbaum Replies